Optical Signal Processing and Pulse Shaping for Wavelength Multiplexed High Speed Communication Systems

The steady growth of capacity demand in telecommunication networks has sparked the development of various photonic devices for ultrafast optical signal processing functions to meet the requirements of future flexible fiber networks in general and backbone in particular. Although these photonic devices expand the electrical bandwidth operation, they mostly operate at single wavelength and hence remain non-viable solutions for practical implementation in WDMnetworks that are considered as the major technology for high speed communications. Another key challenge of future optical networks is the ability tomerge channels in time and frequency domain in the most efficient way in order to reach the theoretical Nyquist limit of transmission links. A promising technique is the use of sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses that enable multiplexing channels in time domain with no inter-symbol interference (ISI) while exhibiting a rectangular spectrumthat alleviates the need for guard-band. The sinc pulse is indeed the basic building block in most theoretical papers that have estimated overall capacity limits, and intense efforts are being made to generate optical Nyquist pulses beyond the limit of electronics that can directly be used at the physical layer. Within the above context, two approaches, referred to as optical signal processing of WDM networks and generation/detection of Nyquist superchannels, have been studied in this thesis. The first addressed problem is simultaneous signal processing of WDMchannels. We present two principal blocks required for routing and transporting data in WDM networks, both based on dual-pump fiber optical parametric amplifier (FOPA) with (sinusoidally) modulated pumps. We show that this scheme can be designed to operate simultaneously on WDM channels at any desired wavelength range. The former block enables simultaneous wavelength conversion and time compression which is a necessary functionality in connecting dissimilar rate WDM networks. The latter processing block is all-optical 3R regeneration (reamplification, reshaping, retiming) which is crucial for maintaining pulse quality along long-haul WDMlinks. We use theoretical analysis supported by experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed technique. The second problem that we investigate is the generation and detection of WDM-Nyquist superchannels. We developed a simple technique based onMach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) to generate a sinc-shaped Nyquist time window by direct synthesis of a rectangular, phase locked frequency comb. We show the produced pulses have exceptional quality as well as high tunability in terms of pulse width and repetition rate. We also further demonstrate a noncoherent method based on the proposed technique to performreal-time demultiplexing of WDM-Nyquist superchannels, simultaneously in time and frequency. The experimental results that are proved by mathematical analysis are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.